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SDN: the evil inside?

It has been treated in abaplog in this entry, and I thought it was not worth the effort to write something, because the linked entry hit the nail with elegance.
But today I was just surfing the ABAP forum there, and found some nice pearls that show the status of it.

The main problem of the official SAP forums is the (excess of) tolerance. Maybe because it’s an official site, and all posters there can be considered “customers”, SDN moderators never had the need to cut some heads (or threads) there. It has derailed into a massive flood of newbie posts, from people who show their lack of attitude (or effort).
I mean, if I’d be an SDN moderator, I will close and/or delete in no time all those posts that can be solved just by a single F1 press. It will clear almost a tenth of the new daily posts.
Then I will go through all those questions that people don’t care to ask again and again. For Pete’s Sake! The SDN has a good search engine, and if it was not because the flood of “re-asked” questions make the search painful, the search utility would be an impressive weapon versus the unknown questions. Let’s chop them too. We will find the number of new posts would be cut to a tenth of the present one. And people would be able to focus their efforts on those real hard questions, while people will have their answers just by using the search.

It would be an impressive upgrade to the site, because people with “real” or “hard” problems will have a whole set of experienced people working toguether and focused, while the rest will have their answers much faster than now (it’s much faster to check the search engine and filter fre dozens of posts than just post your question and wait for an answer).

The lack of posts would give moderators enough time to be able to check the new answers and clear the wrong ones. Just check the abaplog link to an SDN thread that put some of us on fire… five wrong answers in a row! And nobody was able to “moderate” it, until Andrew M. came to close the question (a question that could be solved by just pressing the F1 key, btw).

Let’s summarize it:
– lot of new useless posts that block the search engine
– lot of non-verified wrong answers that will confuse the posters
– lack of focus to look for answers to “real” questions

And just by harden the moderators attitude. Don’t be scared, the SDN will not lose a bunch of customers, it will just lower the number of posts per day, making the whole site much more effective, fast and friendly.

By the way, if someone would be able to just post (and stick) Ilya’s ABAP FAQ’s from SAPFans there, the SDN’s ABAP forum would be a much better place*.

And by doing that (to harden moderators) will prevent the flood of “point beggars”, because just the “useful” experienced people (yes, it excludes me) would be able to be rewarded for their efforts, and not all those beggars that just copy’n’paste old answers and easy-to-find documentation.

* Update: The SDN’s ABAP forum has a FAQ post, but it points to sections of the SDN’s wiki… I spent some time surfing it and found it less useful than Ilya’s SAPFans’ FAQ (I’m sorry to any SDN wiki author)